To dissolve, submerge, and cause to disappear the political or governmental system in the economic system by reducing, simplifying, decentralizing and suppressing, one after another, all the wheels of this great machine, which is called the Government or the State. --Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution

Sunday, May 29, 2011

Carson in The Freeman

1 Comments:

Sadly, I happen to know some ex-radicals who gave up on anarchism and/or marxism to become social democrats, simply because they believed it would be a way for them to get "pro-labor" policies into the mainstream and took up the "it's better than nothing" mentality. Some of them even admit that the whole purpose of the fabian social-democratic welfare state was a way to preserve the capitalist system (i.e. throwing workers crumbs so they wouldn't completely rebel, putting a human face on the capitalist-statist system) yet still promote the "better than nothing" notion.

In a sense, social democrats get it right when they talk about the roots of most of these problems in society and how capitalism fucks over a lot of people and the earth; they just promote a solution that would make the problem *worse* and keep trying to tote around the notion that the state is somehow an antithesis of capitalist exploitation when it's really the enabler and guardian of this exploitation.

And that's what else bothers me: a lot of social democrats seem to have good intentions. We're so used to the idea that the only way to make things better for us and others is to get into positions of power instead of turning to others for solutions. Taking power and doing it the statist way doesn't solve much and actually leads to hampering long-term solutions, since people will have such a rosy view of the state that they won't view it as an institution which needs to be abolished.